Dave McKinnon

Dave McKinnon is a senior applied scientist in the Applied Sciences Group (ASG) at Microsoft working on hardware optimizations for A.I. models.

Before joining ASG, Dave worked on HoloLens, first with speech controls, and then moved to the Head Tracking team until 2023.  He worked on modifications to SLAM, such as adding real-world anchors from detectable codes, non-inertial tracking, and constellation-based tracking.  He joined a startup, which was acquired by Qualcomm, and after some time doing NPU-level optimizations for Qualcomm, decided to do the same for Microsoft.

Dave received his undergraduate degree in engineering and mathematics at UNSW Australia, where he was part of the RoboCup robot soccer team.

In his free time, Dave makes costumes and gadgets from various media, tinkering with electronics, woodwork, metallurgy, et al.  He also enjoys road cycling, gravel cycling, mountain biking, hiking, nordic skiing, resort skiing, and back-country skiing.

Learn more about Dave by visiting dmckinnon.github.io.